Conventional antennas are generally manufactured to operate at a single resonant frequency. Accordingly, many antennas are necessary to make use of the many radio-frequency (“RF”) channels available. To combat this problem, some conventional techniques have been proposed to tune the antenna, i.e. alter the antennas operating resonant frequency. For example, in a conventional patch antenna, one proposed technique for tuning the antenna involves applying a reactance at the edges of the patch using capacitors or diodes. Although this technique has provided improved results over some conventional antennas by achieving a tuning bandwidth of about 50% or a fractional bandwidth of about 1.67:1, the limited total capacitance associated with the diodes and/or capacitors has not permitted dynamic tunability across the attainable band for wide-bandwidth antennas.
Therefore, there is a desire for improved tunable antennas and methods of using the same. Various embodiments of the present invention address this desire.